- Oh hey, you're back for the facts.
Let's get into it. (lips smacking)
Here are 50 Amazing Facts to Blow Your Mind.
(engine revving)
(explosion booming)
Judge Judy is the highest-paid television star
in any genre at $47 million a year.
And since she only works 52 days a year,
this means that she gets paid
a little over $900,000 an episode.
Who knew it'd pay to be so angry?
- The Australian government spent $84 million
on a new internet porn filter in 2007,
but a 16-year-old Melbourne private school student
cracked the code and broke through the new filter
in about 30 minutes.
The boy said that he could deactivate the filter
in a matter of several clicks.
Researchers have discovered that ants are self-aware
after they painted little blue dots on their heads
and put them in front of a mirror.
In the study, 23 out of the 24 adult ants
attempted to scratch the dots from their heads
when they looked in the mirror.
They even reacted to the mirror itself
when all 30 of the ants felt it with their antennas.
In 1758, when George Washington was a young candidate
for the Virginia House of Burgesses,
he spent his entire campaign budget on 605 liters of liquor
and served it to the 391 voters who were present.
Adolf Hitler, Anne Frank's father Otto Frank,
and legendary fantasy author J.R.R. Tolkien
all fought in the famous Battle of the Somme
during World War I.
When someone receives a kidney transplant,
the surgeons don't remove the defective kidney.
Instead, they just put a third on in the body.
In the 1700s, the Swedish military
attempted to form a moose cavalry
because they believed it would intimidate the enemy.
However, it was difficult to domesticate them
because they weren't fed properly
and they also were heavily susceptible
to different types of livestock diseases.
When famous author Aldous Huxley
was dying of a three-year-long battle with cancer,
he asked his wife to inject him
with multiple doses of uncut LSD
as he laid on his death bed.
Everyone in the room said he died
in the most peaceful and serene way.
He also died on the same day
as President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
A 91-year-old Indian gynecologist named Dr. Bhakti Yadav
has been treating her patients for free since 1948,
one year after India gained independence.
During Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's eight-year
high school and college basketball career,
he won an astounding 212 games and only lost eight
while winning a championship
for every year that he was eligible for.
In 2017, it was revealed
that the Dutch King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands
has been a pilot for the last 21 years
and also secretly co-piloted passenger flights
twice a month.
When he was crowned king in 2013,
he decided that he still wanted
to co-pilot passenger flights
because he found flying simply fantastic.
According to the independent
Berkeley Earth science research group,
the air quality was so bad in Delhi, India, at one point
that breathing the air there
was the equivalent of smoking 44 cigarettes a day.
One day, the air quality reading reached a 1,000 mark
on the US Embassy Air Quality Index.
For context, the World Health Organization
has found that anything reaching over 25 is unsafe.
The Stanley Hotel in Colorado,
which was the inspiration for Stephen King's The Shining,
have embraced their famed reputation so much
that they play the movie in a continuous loop
on channel 42 in all of the 160 guest rooms.
Yeah, no thanks.
That's, that's a big no for me.
According to Indiana law,
part of the reason why the coroner is an elected position
is because they have the authority to arrest the sheriff.
This originates from the 12th century,
when the British king was worried
about the growing power of sheriffs and other officials.
He appointed the coroner to monitor these officials
and even got the name coroner
because they represented the crown.
One of the main principles of Gothic architecture
is to let as much natural light in as possible,
even though it's often associated with vampires.
The 2002 movie Van Wilder, starring Ryan Reynolds,
was based on the college days
of a stand-up comedian named Bert Kreischer
when he was just a six-year undergraduate student
at Florida State University.
The button, cremini, and portobello mushroom
are all the same type of mushroom
at different stages of maturity.
Boxing announcer Michael Buffer
and UFC announcer Bruce Buffer were long-lost half-brothers
who hadn't met each other until later in life
when they learned that they shared
the same biological father.
According to the University of Wolverhampton,
the oldest recorded joke in history
dates back to the ancient Sumerians around 1900 BC.
The joke goes, (clearing throat) something like this.
Something which has never occurred since time immemorial,
a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap.
Yeah, I don't know.
The live mascot of the University of Washington Huskies
is not a husky at all,
but actually an Alaskan Malamute named Dubs II.
Canadian researchers have found that when we listen to music
and have a strong emotional attachment with a certain song,
dopamine is released into our system.
This is why we can sometimes get goosebumps
when listening to a song that we enjoy.
When songwriters Jack Norworth and Albert Von Tilzer
wrote the popular song Take Me Out to the Ball Game in 1908,
neither of them had ever attended a baseball game before.
There are more tigers living in captivity
in the United States than there are living in the wild.
The most prolific drummer in rock and roll history
is Hal Blaine of The Wrecking Crew.
He has played on 40 number-one hit singles,
150 top-10 hits, and over 35,000 tracks!
He's performed with Nancy Sinatra, Elvis Presley,
The Beach Boys, Steely Dan, Simon and Garfunkel,
John Denver, and The Monkees, among many other musicians.
With the exception of ostriches, birds do not have bladders
because it helps them save weight for flying.
As a result, they are unable to urinate.
During the American Prohibition era,
it was perfectly legal to drink and own alcohol in private.
It was only illegal to transport,
produce, import, and sell alcohol.
According to the Mayo Clinic,
30-35% of people who fracture their ribs
and are over 65 years old contract pneumonia.
So, if you're that age, be very careful.
Scientists discovered a 125-million-year-old dinosaur fossil
that had dandruff.
In a study published by Nature Communications,
it explains that dinosaurs shed their skin in small flakes,
similar to today's birds.
November Rain by the rock band Guns N' Roses
is the longest song in history
to be on the Billboard Hot 100 chart
at eight minutes and 57 seconds.
NASA's Vehicle Assembly Building
has four of the largest doors in the world,
with each one standing at 139 meters high.
It also takes 45 minutes to completely open or close one.
In 2016, a little bird called an Arctic tern
was recorded migrating from the coast of England
to Antarctica and then back again.
The bird flew a total of 95,997 kilometers,
which is the longest migration ever recorded
and is the equivalent
of flying around the circumference of the Earth twice
plus over 16,000 kilometers.
The Scottish town of Dull, the US city of Boring in Oregon,
and the Australian city of Bland all united together
and created an annual holiday every August 9th
called Dull, Boring, and Bland Day.
Artist Alfie Bradley created a seven-meter-tall sculpture
made out of 100,000 knives in an effort to raise awareness
of the growing knife crime rate in the UK.
But the police confiscated the sculpture,
but also partnered with other stations
to receive knives off the street
to add to the masterwork that they unveiled to the public.
Artist Claude Monet would find faults in his painting
and destroy them on the spot.
Before an exhibition, he once destroyed 15 of his paintings,
causing the exhibition to be postponed.
A paper reported that the paintings were worth $100,000,
which is over $2 million today.
There's a parasite called the tongue-eating louse
that swims through a fish's gills
and eats away at the tongue.
The parasite latches on to the remaining stub
and becomes the fish's new tongue.
The parasite is not harmful to humans unless it's picked up,
and then it can bite.
Minnesota is the only state in the United States
that requires any US flag that is on sale
to be made in the United States.
The State of Washington is experiencing a growing problem
where more and more people are leaving their cars
and bikes on the ferries.
This is a concern because the employees
have to take into consideration
that the passengers fell overboard.
When legendary comedian and filmmaker Mel Brooks
was putting his handprints on the Hollywood Walk of Fame,
he placed an 11th prosthetic finger on one of his hands.
The show Mythbusters did an experiment
to see if there was a correlation
between servers with large breasts and more cash tips.
What they found out was not only did men tip 30% more
but women tipped even more at 40%.
Astronomers recently discovered
one of the oldest stars in the universe,
and it resides right here in our Milky Way,
about 2,000 light years from Earth.
According to the Astrophysical Journal,
the small red dwarf star is about 13.5 billion years old.
In 1474, a rooster laid an egg in Basel, Switzerland,
which sent the entire community into a panic
because they thought it was the work of Satan.
They put the rooster on trial
and eventually burned it alive,
but they later found out that it was actually a hen
and just looked like a rooster.
(crowing)
Michael Jackson had to get clothes in a smaller size
by the end of his concert performances
because he lost so much weight on stage
from sweating and would literally shrink.
According to the Giving USA 2012 report,
from the years 2001 to 2011,
the world has seen a huge rise in generosity.
Giving around the world grew 240%
in a span of just those 10 years.
The iconic villain The Joker from the Batman comics
was originally supposed to be killed
in his second appearance by being stabbed in the heart.
However, the editor at the time, Whitney Ellsworth,
decided to keep The Joker alive,
and he later became the perfect archnemesis
to Batman and Robin.
Well, that's good
because The Joker's one of my favorite characters.
He's just a dog chasing cars.
He wouldn't know what to do with one if he caught it.
In West Virginia during the late-1950s,
the US government asked a local hotel called the Greenbrier
to build a secret bunker underground for Congress
in the event of a nuclear attack.
The project was called Project Green Island
and was built from 1959 to 1962.
It was kept secret until the Washington Post discovered it
and reported it in '92.
The Beastie in The Beastie Boys stands for
boys entertaining anarchistic states
towards inner excellence.
Eczema outbreaks can be treated
by applying Vaseline to the affected area
and then wrapping it in plastic wrap.
The hit song Royals by Lorde
was banned by two San Francisco radio stations
during the 2014 World Series
between the San Francisco Giants and the Kansas City Royals.
This is because angry listeners and fans
would email the stations to complain.
An American soldier named Henry Gunther
was the last person killed in World War I.
He was fatally shot at 10:59 a.m.,
which was one minute before the armistice
and end of the war.
In 1988, a Syracuse University art student
stole a human skull from a mausoleum
with the intention of using it for a sculpting class.
After he was caught by police,
it was discovered that it was the skull of John J. Crouse,
who was the mayor of Syracuse from 1876 to 1880.